Key West author of crime & noir fiction

Tag Archives: Titan Books

When you love a great series character, and the author dies, a little of you dies with him, because you know that your beloved character will visit you no more. Many millions of crime fiction fans felt that way when Mickey Spillane passed away in 2006 at the age of 88, because with his departure, […]

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened Samuel Fuller’s Brainquake (Titan Books/Hard Case Crime, 2014) to the first page. And then I read the opening line: Sixty seconds before the baby shot the father, leaves fell lazily in Central Park. Hook goes in mouth. Paul Page is sitting on a bench in Central […]

Imagine several cars plowing full speed ahead from all different directions toward a common intersection. Only now imagine that, instead of going in straight lines toward the center, their routes are long and curvy, allowing some of them to pass each other like ships in the night. In some cases, they even ride two abreast […]

It’s tough out there for the professional hitman. You’ve got to pick up and go to a strange town on a moment’s notice, locate your target, and stake him out for a week or so, following his every move, learning his habits, in order to minimize the margin of error. Then, if you work alone, you […]

Eighty-nine percent chance of success. Eighty-nine percent. Sounds pretty good, right? In other words, for every one hundred trials, you will succeed eighty-nine times and fail eleven times. In gamblers’ parlance, that makes you an “odds-on” favorite, a proposition on which you would be well-advised to risk money. But how about risking your freedom? Or […]

Between 1966 and 1972, Michael Crichton wrote eleven novels, all of them under pen names, with the exception of The Andromeda Strain (1969). “John Lange” was his favorite pseudonym and that was the one he used when he wrote the Edgar-nominated Grave Descend (1970), a fast-moving tale of sunken yachts, hammerhead sharks, and assorted unsavory characters. The novel […]